


Morning

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Marriage, Mornings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-10 09:12:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6977143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What else breaks with the day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morning

The baby seemed to wake her at sunrise every day. Jed rested beside her, undisturbed. He looked much younger in his sleep, despite the growing silver at his temples and his beard, the salt uneven. He slept on his side, facing her, one arm always reaching toward her, even if his hand fell from her hip or what was left of her waist in the night. She had grown accumstomed to seeing his bare chest, dark hair scattered, the thicket under his arm when he flung one arm over his head; she had been taken aback at first that he refused to wear a nightshirt unless the temperature was frigid but now she only appreciated seeing the expanse of his skin, was familiar with the marks, the dip of his navel and the way his hipbones could breach the smoothness of his flesh. Since the War ended, he had dressed more consistently formally. She would not walk into a room and find his vest unbuttoned or shed, braces visible, he did not stride about with his collar and cuffs loose. She was still not entirely sure what he had been about at Mansion House—had he simply bent to the exigencies of the time, medicine his first and last concern, or had he intended, had he acknowledged, that he meant to provoke her? And to what, then? She might ask him when he awakened. It was a question for the bedroom, not the breakfast table where they would sit, Dr. and Mrs. Foster, where etiquette prevailed before the little housemaid Nettie and only his eyes spoke of the liberties he sought, had sought and had been granted so readily. 

She wore a nightdress made of muslin every night. At least, she wore it to bed and some nights she woke tangled in its folds, like a caterpillar in its cocoon, and others Jed pulled it over her head and threw it to the floor before he resumed his love-making. She had wondered how he would be with her after she told him, but her pregnancy had simply inspired him to greater creativity and he was very attentive to whatever might ail or annoy her. He was everything more—tender, passionate, vocal, eager, unless what was called for was to be less. He had barely touched her breasts for months since he noticed her wince and fail to suppress a shrug away from his teasing mouth. He had told her outright he only wanted her pleasure and would not touch her at all if she would not tell him what she was comfortable with, though he’d whispered to her “I admit, Molly, it is hard to refrain when you have grown even more tempting, so delicious, I want to eat you up.” He knew now that her entire body was more sensitive, but she could hardly bear to have her breasts touched and she wondered how she would nurse the baby when he arrived. It had seemed an odd question to ask the midwife though she hadn’t felt especially awkward saying as much to Jed with his pragmatic physician’s approach to anything to do with the body. “I expect it will work itself out, Molly, your body has seemed to know what to do in every other way and there seems to be no shortage of plump infants with mothers to dote upon them,” he’d said before stretching and rising from the bed naked, unselfconscious and startlingly handsome.

This hour between five and six, when the sun had risen but had barely changed the sky from silver-grey to a blue and gold glory, was hers with the baby who thumped or shifted in her belly. She found she could press one spot with her fingertips and then feel a press back; over the past week, she thought she could tell the tiny arc of his foot from the shove of a shoulder or the round push of his head. Several days ago, she’d woken to a strangely rhythmic little leap within; she meant to ask Mrs. Ballard when she saw her again but Jed hypothesized hiccoughs which had made her smile broadly. It was a half-awake time when she let her thoughts wander as she focused her attention primarily on what was within. She would stroke her hands over her growing belly meditatively. She was frequently caught, one wrist in Jed’s firm grasp before he released her hand to spread his own across her, a claim and a benediction. He had a new smile for that moment, a sweet mixture of pride and delight, a little bemused. There were times he would feel the movement of the baby and say, “I could never have imagined this, Molly, to feel my own child and you at once, you are such a blessing,” and then kiss her very long and soft instead of the thank you she had told him not to offer. 

Other mornings, especially rainy dawns when the sun barely rose from the layers of clouds, Jed did not stir. Still she woke with the baby and thought of the nursery down the hall, the letter she meant to write to Emma, other mornings in other places. She recalled the strangeness of waking on the floor, iron bedsteads like a canyon’s walls on either side, and the alarum of Anne’s voice that roused Mary faster than any clock. The little white bed of her girlhood, the small room with its sloping eaves. The linden tree had nearly breached the window where the low chest sat. She had had one shelf of that held eight books, including her Bible and George’s discarded copy of the Iliad, and she had thought herself a queen. And there were mornings she recalled the bedroom she had shared with Gustav—it had had rose patterned curtains she was very proud of making and a quilt she pieced covered the bed. There were rag rugs on the floor that her mother had stiched together, worn but serviceable. Gustav kept a few pictures on his bureau, his sister Anneliese in her wedding dress, looking nearly unhappy, his father with a white beard and high collar. There was no picture of Mary “because I keep you beside me already, Liebling.” The books were kept downstairs in a cabinet with glass doors. She was younger and slept more deeply then; she would wake to find him staring at the ceiling “considering the experiment, I am not sure the reagents are right” or with his head pillowed on one bent arm, face turned towards her. His eyes had been blue, a very dark blue that was nearly grey, and he had regarded her then with a solemn tranquility.

Rarely, almost against her will, she remembered the first weeks after he had died. She had woken very early then, sometimes before the sun was up, at the end of night that had not yet turned to day. She had cried briefly when she had returned home with the laudanum and the housemaid told her he had died without her but she had not wept again. She would only wake so early and lie there in their bed, and wonder why she had kept breathing through the night. She found herself in the center of the bed, where she had never slept and would try to make herself small, knees drawn to her belly. She would wake with her arms stretched out, one leg pointed away like a compass needle. She wished she were closer to the ocean, so she might go out in the waves and let herself be carried away, empty and iridescent as a jelly, without the crust of a shore to be seen. Perhaps if she had had a child, she might have found the platitudes her neighbors offered had some meaning, but nothing had come of all their gentle joining. She had wondered once or twice, when her bleeding was late and heavy, one day when she had to catch the edge of the table to keep from falling from the sudden clawing within her, but what had there been to say? She thought now, she would have told Jed although she knew he would have been more solicitous than she preferred; still to tell him would have been a comfort without judgment, the workings of the body less mysterious to him but always worth knowing. She had not told Gustav her hopeful suspicions and did not tell him about any womanly suffering. He was a scientist though, still observant, and noticed the shadows under her eyes, the way she pressed her lips together on an inhalation. He would bring her an extra cup of tea or rest his hands against her empty belly so the warmth would soothe her.

It was too hard to think of him in their bed, healthy or ill. She tried to remember him walking down the street with her, his coat freshly brushed and boots polished, full of conversation or as they sat at the table with its white cloth and he smiled at her attempt at caraway dumplings. The intervening years since his death had softened the blow; all the other injuries and suffering, the large and small happinesses, had all worked on the brutal edge so she could bear it, a great loss she was could be glad she had survived, as she knew he would have been pleased. She would always mourn him but it was a burden she could manage now. She did not fret anymore about Jed’s reaction if a certain day or circumstance reminded her of him. He had first been respectful but distant when she mentioned Gustav until she had told him one night how she had not wished to live, had not been able to see a way to destroy herself but rued every sunrise. He had pulled her toward him and held her very tightly. He had said, very low, “Oh Molly, I am so sorry, how much you were hurt,” and didn’t say anything else but kissed her neck and then the crown of her head.

Yesterday, she had woken with tears streaming down her face. It was not an anniversary, there was nothing to mark it, but she had dreamt so clearly of the third day after Gustav died, the alternation between annilihation and the insistent presence of pain, the fear and anger she could barely escape with frantic activity. She had scrubbed the entire kitchen floor that day. The only peace she had found was the moment she put her hand in the hot water for the rag and the perfect pour of the dirty water from the wooden bucket’s lip to the patch of earth beside the back door. The dream was completely vivid and when she woke, she had not left it behind, dissipating like smoke or the steam from her Ceylon tea; she was convinced that was reality and all that had come after was the dream. Jed had slept behind her, so she faced the rest of the bed, its bedclothes little disturbed. The slant of light was the same she had known so well in that other room. She wept bitterly, for Gustav and losing him, for the terrible pain that struck her to be alone, without Jedediah, her baby the ephemera of sleep and longing.

Perhaps he had always been thus, but Jed had not lost his physician’s ability to wake immediately. He did not require any slow transition to accustom himself to the daylight and its requirements. She sobbed and his arms were around her, a tether. Then his voice, a little rough from the night, “Molly, what it is? Are you in pain? Tell me.”

She had choked a little, the tears’ salt in her mouth, “I woke and I thought, Gustav had only just died, I have lost him, and this, everything else, you and the baby, I have lost all that too, I have never had it,” then she stopped to hear it said and she tried to curl her body more tightly to contain the way it wrenched her. Jed moved even closer and she felt his beard against her neck where her night plait had fallen away. His chest braced her back. His hands stroked against her belly, once, twice, before he left them there, steady, reality coming back to her too slowly still.

“No, sweetheart, it’s all right, I’m here, it was only a dream,” he said and the softness of his breath in her ear, began to bring her back to herself. Her awareness of her body was still uneven—which Mary was she? The baby did not move and she thought, I have deceived myself again. She thought it would be a shout when she said it, but her voice was low and broken.

“There is no baby, though? I wanted him so…And you, you have a wife who fails you, oh, I am so sorry.” She was still lost in the terror and grief of that, though Jed had come back, was hers again. A moment passed, one heartbeat, then she felt him explore her belly with his fingers, then carefully press down. An instant and then there was a lazy little kick against her, him.

“There he is, there is your baby, Molly, my baby I put in your belly. We have made him, he is ours and you will have him in your arms soon enough. Listen to me, sweetheart, you are right here beside me, wake up and feel my baby in you, you haven’t lost us,” he said, his tone firm and consoling. The baby kicked again and it was finally enough. She felt the dream recede, the abandonment it had drowned her in nearly shed. In its place was a strange emotion, mixed of relief and surprise; she could not understand how the dream had held her so fiercely but she could not call herself foolish or silly when the degree of her distress was so recent and pronounced. She felt like a white shell upon the shore, newly scoured by the tide.

Jed had gotten up and refreshed himself with water from the china bowl, then came back to the bed with a damp cloth. He sat beside her and wiped the tears from her cheeks, then pushed back the curls loose around her face. He stroked his finger beneath her eyes, where the tearstains had been. He set his right hand down upon her belly where the baby, now awakened, moved and turned, butting at her right side.

“He’s busy now, isn’t he?” he said, the smile in his eyes as much as his tone.

“Yes. It’s often this way in the morning. I can’t think why I was so convinced, why I let the dream bother me so,” she replied, not quite ashamed of herself but close to it.

“It did, that’s enough. I have had my own nightmares, I understand how they may refuse to release you,” he said gently.

“I’m sorry though, to wake you that way,” she offered. The room was filling with sunlight and the baby was kicking again now, as reassuring as he could be.

“Please don’t apologize—I am your husband. You are so easy to love, Molly, but not always so easy to care for, how you manage everything so neatly and with so little complaint. It makes me feel close to you, when you are willing to share how scared you are or what hurts you, when you are willing to let me help,” he paused. She sat up against the pillows and he gave a little pat to her belly. “This morning, you needed me and it is what I want to do, to take care of you. I know you are worried about the baby, more than you say to me. I wish you would say more, if you need to, I would listen. And, love, you have never failed me as a wife, you have never failed me before you were my wife. Even if you were not with child, you would always be more than enough for me,” he finished. He leaned towards her then and she moved forward, to touch their mouths in a brief kiss.

“I hardly noticed just now, but why did you keep calling the baby ‘him?’ I know you hope for a girl,” she asked. It was a good question to bridge them from her unmoored emotion to the regularity of a day, a familiar and mild disagreement as reassuring as his slightly stale breath, the clatter of Nettie in the kitchen below.

“Well, I know you think it is a boy, you always speak of the baby that way. I didn’t think it was the time to say ‘it’ or ‘she,’ you needed to hear what is true for you. And, as you have often reminded me, one of us will be right and we’ll know soon enough. Truly, I only want you safely delivered, the baby healthy, I don’t care whether we have a daughter or a son,” he replied. He looked at her closely, then stood to start dressing for the day.

“Shall I have Mrs. Townsend send you up a tray? It would not hurt you to rest a while longer,” he said, neatly buttoning his linen shirt, walking about the room in search for his shoes, which were where she always left them before she went to bed. He was Dr. Foster again, cravat tied, vest and coat on, little hint of the man who had so recently sat next to her entirely bare, curls ruffled from the night.

“No, I think if you will tolerate me a little en dishabille, I would rather sit with you at the table. I will dress for my calls later,” she said. It would take nearly an hour to complete her toilette, but she had the time to spare after he left for the hospital.

“If I will tolerate you? Woman, you wound me,” he laughed, helping her into her maternity stays, then the loose print house dress she wore. She piled her tangle of curls into a green velvet snood Jed favored and he gave a quick nod of amused approval. Her own kid slippers were where she had left them as well and she put them on, then took the hand he extended to rise. They walked to the bedroom door, his hand now at her lower back. It was a guide and reminder, dispelled the last of the night and its grief, onto the day, of fresh porridge and calls, the letter to write at her desk, and then Jed again, home full of questions and remarks. Her mind had regained its regular aspect. Gustav was again a tender ache, and her baby appeared ready to settle with her own walking about, lulled back to sleep within her.

**Author's Note:**

> Ok-- I decided go big or go home, so I tried to do both "morning" and "mourning" in this prompt. I had already had some thoughts about what it was like for Mary after her husband died and I am familiar with that found time you can get before you are really ready to get up when you still lie in bed and your mind can wander places. I specifically tried to address the issue of Jed's level of sartorial decorum (i.e., he is Victorian-ly half-naked on the show all the time) for those of you who have already noted it. Mary's childhood bedroom should remind you of Anne of Green Gables :) Emma is largely off-screen here but I like that idea that part of Mary's day is writing to her.


End file.
